Last fall
was a great time for official optimism when
it came to Iraq. The military "metrics" looked ever better and, as had happened
at crucial moments in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, Bush administration and
military statements turned practically peachy with the blush of "success."
Progress was announced (repeatedly). Corners were once again about to be turned.
Tipping points were on the absolute verge of being reached. "I've never been
more optimistic than I am right now with the progress we've made in Iraq,"
effused Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, late
that October. Lt. Col. Val Keaveny, 3rd Batallion, 509th infantry, offered this
over-the-top mixed metaphor: "[Iraqis] are fed up with fear. Once they hit that
tipping point, they're fed up. They come to realize we truly do provide them
better hope for the future. What we're seeing now is the beginning of a
snowball." That same month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen,
citing a butcher in the suburbs of Baghdad who had seen his business rise from
selling one sheep a week to one a day,
said: "I don't want to overly state it... but it's starting to happen."

And then there was George
W. Bush, the man who, in November 2005, more than two and a half years after he
ordered the invasion of Iraq, launched his "strategy for victory in Iraq" with a
speech, wielding the word "victory" 15 times and who, in January 2007,
launched his "new way forward in Iraq" (aka his "surge" strategy) in an
address to the nation in which he used "victory" a mere two times. On
November 2, 2007, the President offered
this bit of good cheer to a gathering of 1,300 soldiers graduating from
basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and likely headed for Iraq (or
Afghanistan): "Slowly but surely, the people of Iraq are reclaiming a normal
society."

To
celebrate that return to normalcy and, undoubtedly, all the corners so far
turned and points tipped, the U.S. military has, in the last two months, fired
at least 200 Hellfire missiles into the Iraqi capital, according to
the Washington Post, most of them into Sadr City, the vast, heavily
populated Shiite slum in east Baghdad. ("Just six" had been used in Baghdad in
the previous three months.) Perhaps it was on the basis of such celebrations of
normalcy that Senator John McCain recently promised Americans victory in Iraq in
a
mere four and a half years. He even offered a likely date: January 2013.
Something to look forward to.

It takes an expert, of
course, to make sense of these repeated demonstrations of Washingtonian and
military expertise. Fortunately, Tomdispatch had two experts lurking in the
wings, Christopher Cerf and former Nation editor and publisher Victor
Navasky of the eminently respected and respectable Institute of Expertology.
They have recently produced a rollicking ride through Bush administration
expertise – a compendium of the quotes that launched a thousand ships and that
you simply can't believe anyone actually said. ("A turning point will come two
weeks from today." George W. Bush, June
16, 2004.) Its title:
Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak.
They seemed the perfect duo to put Senator McCain's particular brand of
expertise in context. Tom

McCain (mis)speaks too

How
the Senator Won the War of Words
in Iraq
(again and again and again?)

By
Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky

The Iraq war was a
disaster for Iraq, a disaster for the United States, a disaster for the Middle
East, a disaster for the world community, but most of all, it was a disaster for
the experts.

They were wrong about
its difficulty. (It was to be either "a cakewalk" or "a walk in the park" –
take your pick).

They were wrong about
how our troops would be greeted ("as liberators"
said Vice President Dick Cheney on September, 14, 2003; "with kites and
boom boxes"
wrote Professor Fouad Ajami on October 7, 2002).

They were wrong about
weapons of mass destruction. ("Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons
of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool – or
possibly a Frenchman – could conclude otherwise"
wroteWashington Post columnist Richard Cohen on February 6, 2003.)

They were wrong about
how many troops would be needed. ("It's hard to conceive that it would take
more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to
conduct a war itself,"
said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on Feb 27, 2003.)

They were wrong about
the number of casualties. ("...we're not going to have any casualties," said
President George W. Bush in
March, 2003).

They were wrong about
how much it would cost. ("The costs of any intervention would be very small,"
according to White House economic advisor Glenn
Hubbard on October 4, 2002).

They were wrong about
how long it would last. ("It isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't
going to be months either,"
claimed Richard Perle on July 11, 2002.)

They were wrong about
the "sinister nexus between Iraq
and the Al Qaeda terrorist network," as Secretary of State Colin Powell
put it in addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003.

They were wrong about
the likelihood of Iraq descending into civil war. ("[There is] a broad Iraqi
consensus favoring the idea of pluralism,"
insisted William Kristol and Robert Kagan on March 22, 2004.)

There was, in fact, very
little they were not wrong about.

Who are we to make such
charges? Not to be boastful, we are, respectfully, the CEO and president – the
founders, as it were – of the Institute of Expertology,
which has been surveying expert opinion for almost 25 years. It is true that our
initial study, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative
Misinformation, came under attack back in 1990 because, at the time, we
failed to find a single expert who was right, although we readily conceded that,
in statistical theory, it was possible that the experts were right as much as
half the time. It just proved exceedingly difficult to find evidence of that
other 50%.

In
Mission Accomplished!, our new study of the experts – people who, by
virtue of their official status, formal title, academic degree, professional
license, public office, journalistic beat, quantity of publications, experience,
and/or use of highly technical jargon, are presumed to know what they are
talking about – we once again came under attack from critics who claimed that
our failure to include any misstatements by Senator Barack Obama betrayed a
political bias. These allegations were quickly refuted. Everybody knows that
Obama has no experience and therefore does not qualify as an expert. Senator
Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, did make the cut, but the
presidential candidate-cum-expert of genuine interest is Senator John McCain.

At first, we were
impressed by the senator's statements in Republican primary debates about how he
had actually opposed the Bush administration's conduct of the war from the
start. As he
told CNN's Kiran Chetry, in August of 2007, "I was the greatest critic of
the initial four years, three-and-a half years."

Well, having dug into
those missing years a bit, here, for the record, is what we found to be Senator
McCain's typical responses to some of the key questions posed above:

How would American
troops be greeted?: "I believe?
that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators." (March
20, 2003)

Did Saddam Hussein
have a nuclear program that posed an imminent threat to the United States?:
"Saddam Hussein is on a crash course to construct a nuclear weapon." (October
10, 2002)

Will a war with Iraq
be long or short?: "This conflict
is? going to be relatively short." (March
23, 2003)

How is the war
going?: "I would argue that the
next three to six months will be critical." (September
10, 2003)

How is it going
(almost two months later, from the war's "greatest critic")?
"I think the initial phases of [the war] were so spectacularly successful that
it took us all by surprise." (October
31, 2003)

Is this war really
necessary?: "Only the most deluded
of us could doubt the necessity of this war." (August
30, 2004)

How is it going?
(Recurring question for the war's "greatest critic"):
"We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year."
(December
4, 2005)

Will the President's
"surge" of troops into Baghdad and surrounding areas that the senator had been
calling for finally make the difference?:
"We can know fairly well [whether the surge is working] in a few months." (February
4, 2007)

In April 2007,
accompanied by several members of Congress, Senator McCain made a surprise visit
to Baghdad to assess the surge, had a "stroll" through a market in the Iraqi
capital, and then held a news conference where he discussed what he
found: "Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I've been here
many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport.
Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today. The American
people are not getting the full picture of what's happening here today."

The next evening, NBC's
Nightly News provided
further details on that "stroll." The Senator and Congressmen were
accompanied by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two
Apache gunships overhead." (In addition, the network said, still photographs
provided by the military revealed that McCain and his colleagues had been
wearing body armor during their entire stroll.)

Reality check:
Five months later, on
September 12, 2007, McCain again observed that "the next six months are
going to be critical."

Six months later,
McCain claimed that the U.S. had finally reached a genuine turning point in Iraq
and that his faith in the surge was (once again) vindicated. On March 17, 2008,
he
reported: "We are succeeding. And we can succeed and American casualties
overall are way down. That is in direct contradiction to predictions made by the
Democrats and particularly Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I will be glad
to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people
appreciate it."

Well, we at the Institute
of Expertology
appreciate it, too, and we are, of course, pleased to record the Senator's
ever-renewable faith in this latest turning point.

As scrupulous scholars,
however, we do feel compelled to add that the Senator is not the first to detect
such a turning point.

Indeed on July 7, 2003,
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith
said: "This month will be a political turning point for Iraq."

On November 6, 2003,
President Bush
observed: "We've reached another great turning point..." On June 16, 2004,
President Bush
claimed: "A turning point will come two weeks from today."

That same day the
Montreal Gazette headlined an editorial by neoconservative columnist Max
Boot: "Despite the Negative Reaction by Much of the Media, U.S. Marines Did a
Good Job in Fallujah, a Battle That Might Prove a Turning Point."

On February 2, 2005,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
stated: "On January 30th in Iraq, the world witnessed an important moment
in the global struggle against tyranny, a moment that historians might one day
call a major turning point."

On March 7, 2005
William Kristol
wrote: "[T]he Iraqi election of January 30, 2005... will turn out to have
been a genuine turning point."

On December 18, as that
year ended, Vice President Cheney, while conceding that "the level of violence
has continued,"
assuredABC News: "I do believe that when we look back on this
period of time, 2005 will have been the turning point..."

The Institute continued to
record turning points in remarkable numbers in 2006, and 2007, but perhaps in
2008 the surge will, indeed, turn out to be the turning point to end all turning
points. After all, Senator McCain has staked his campaign on it.